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The Pacific Garden Program

The Pacific Garden Program encompasses three gardens: The Ted & Chris Robb Garden, the Bon Appetit Native Plant Garden (both on the Stockton Campus), and the Sacramento McGeorge Community Garden (on the Sacramento Campus). The Pacific Garden Program provides a teaching and learning laboratory for students to explore their interconnectedness with their environment; learn principles and practices of gardening that can enrich the rest of their lives; enjoy the value of shared hard work with the benefit of reaping the products of their labor; and participate with faculty, staff, students and interested others in the neighboring Central Valley to develop a visible project that enacts the principles of responsible environmental action and sustainability.

I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at a store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and re-use its own wastes ... A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us.